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…Opening To…

Come, then, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord? (St. Anselm)

…Listening In…

Lord, you have examined me. You know me. You know when I sit down and when I stand up. Even from far away, you comprehend my plans. You study my traveling and resting. You are thoroughly familiar with all my ways. There isn’t a word on my tongue, Lord, that you don’t already know completely. You surround me—front and back. You put your hand on me. (Psalm 139:1-5; context)

…Filling Up…

God as Cosmic Creator, who “stretches out the heavens like a curtain,” did not need a reason to speak creation into being. I might need a reason to build a bookcase or compose a letter, but God doesn’t need to share my motivations. If God did not need a reason to create, why would that same creator need a reason to care about us insignificant grasshoppers? God’s very greatness subsumes the “Why” question into God’s eternal being and renders it irrelevant. With the “Why” expunged, the gut-twinging question becomes a glorious statement of faith: “You care about me, Lord.”

You care about me, Lord. When I finally realize this, I notice that God as Intimate Companion has been whispering these words in my ear the whole time. Then I realize that God’s care for me (another word for which is grace) enables and enthuses me to care for others. The penchant for betrayal and disregard for others’ welfare, once unfairly plastered onto God’s being, now fall away as God continues to make me in God’s own image.

Our world is vast and full of questions. We are insignificant. We are messy. We are little things. But God’s vastness stretches into eternity. In staggering showers of grace-filled generosity, God both answers and removes the need to question. In those same showers falls the gift of sanctifying love, which removes our insignificance and scrubs us cleans. As we discern the Cosmic Creator and Intimate Companion in the same loving face of God, more words from the prophet Isaiah resound: “Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

…Praying For…

Dear God, thank you for not abandoning me to questions that I will never fully comprehend. Thank you for answering me with the simple reassurance of your presence. Thank you for caring about me. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, comforted by the faith that your foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and hopeful that I might let your foolishness educate me.

…Opening To…

Come, then, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord? (St. Anselm)

…Listening In…

God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them. (Genesis 1:27; context)

…Filling Up…

This misguided transfer of shabbiness from myself to God is difficult to suspend. Human nature dictates that we narcissistically use ourselves as the measuring sticks by which other things are evaluated. Our ability to reason, manufacture tools, and put our thoughts into speech elevates us above other animals. We then use these factors to order other species by “intelligence.” Chimpanzees eat using rudimentary utensils. Dolphins communicate with their cackling code. Therefore, based on the anthropomorphic scale, these creatures are closer to our presumed preeminence.

But the scale works the other way, as well. Our penchants for betrayal, mistrust, indifference and our well-rehearsed disregard for the welfare of others knock a bleaker set of notches into the measuring stick. When the gut-twinging question surfaces – “Why do you care about me, Lord? – these regrettable attributes emigrate from our world and narcissistically modify our understanding of God.

Having thus remade God in my own lamentable image, the collision in my gut worsens. The Cosmic Creator looks down and sees a bunch of tiny grasshoppers, so why should that God be bothered? The Intimate Companion is probably just as apathetic and self-centered as I am, so why should that God care?

Do you see the twisted, oxymoronic reasoning that leads to these conclusions? The gut-twinging question appears when I notice my own laughable insignificance. At the same time, I use myself as the measuring stick for which to assess God’s motivation to care about me. This logic definitely deserves the red FOOLISHNESS stamp.

You see, when the prophet Isaiah expounds on God’s greatness and ineffability, he is not extolling God’s distance and isolation. Instead, he is warning people not to engage in the foolish business of looking for God in the mirror. The Holy One says, “To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal?” The answer is quite obviously a resounding “NO ONE!” When you escape the twisted logic that seeks to anthropomorphize God, you are one step closer to resolving the gut-twinging question – “Why do you care about me, Lord?”

(We have reached the turn. Stay tuned for the good news! To be concluded tomorrow…)

…Praying For…

Dear God, you made me in your image, not the other way around. Help me return to you from the self-centeredness that can dominate my life. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, comforted by the faith that your foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and hopeful that I might let your foolishness educate me.

…Opening To…

Come, then, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord? (St. Anselm)

…Listening In…

On the day the Lord God made earth and sky… the Lord God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east and put there the human he had formed. (Genesis 2:4b, 7-8; context)

…Filling Up…

The second chapter of Genesis presents another view of the same creative God found in the first chapter of Genesis. God is not standing at the podium, waving a baton as the performing forces of creation harmonize the music of life. In the second story, God, rather the being the conductor, is the instrumentalist: God plays each violin and French horn and clarinet. “In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,” says Genesis, God bent down in the dust and formed a human being. Then, into his nostrils, God breathed the “breath of life.” When the human became lonely, God put him to sleep, and out of the man’s own flesh God created another human being. As the story continues, the man and woman heard God “walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze.”

This movement and participation in the creation, this intimacy, speak of the God who eventually becomes incarnate as the word made flesh, Jesus Christ. This is the understanding of God that Joan Osbourne wonders about when she sings: “What if God was one of us…just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?” This is the understanding of God that the old hymn describes: “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.”

The tension between our understanding of God as “Cosmic Creator” and as “Intimate Companion” brings us back to the gut-twinging question: “Why do you care about me, Lord?” In those moments of existential angst, the Cosmic Creator easily trumps the Intimate Companion because the former seems so much bigger, holier, more powerful. When my gut compares the two, the latter seems somehow lessened by my own shabbiness.

(Stay tuned to hear about the misguided transfer of shabbiness! To be continued tomorrow…)

…Praying For…

Dear God, you breathed life into me and by your Spirit you gave me breath. Help me to use the inspiration found in that breath to work for the coming of your reign here on earth. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, comforted by the faith that your foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and hopeful that I might let your foolishness educate me.

…Opening To…

Come, then, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord? (St. Anselm)

…Listening In…

God named the light Day and the darkness Night. There was evening and there was morning: the first day. God said, “Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate the waters from each other.” God made the dome and separated the waters under the dome from the waters above the dome. And it happened in that way. God named the dome Sky. There was evening and there was morning: the second day. (Genesis 1:5-8; context)

…Filling Up…

Of course, there’s no reason why God should care about a messy, little thing like me. To think God does is truly first-rate foolishness.

The prophet Isaiah doesn’t help matters. He says, “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing… To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One.”

There’s a tension in our scriptures — a twofold presentation — about how God relates to us that feeds the pulsing in my gut. The dual stories of creation in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis illustrate this tension. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…” says the first verse of Genesis. The narrative goes on to tell how God spoke creation into being. Creation was ordered: light separated from darkness, day from night, land from sea from sky. God orchestrated the emergence of life and proclaimed the creation “good” and, indeed, “very good.”

This ordering, this filling the void with matter and energy and life and light, speaks of the Cosmic Creator, whose voice and arm stretch into the vast expanse of eternity. This is the understanding of God that Bette Midler promotes when she sings: “God is watching us from a distance.” This is the understanding of God that the Enlightenment era Deists caricatured as a great Watchmaker, who set the gears running and then left well enough alone.

(Stay tuned for the second Creation story! To be continued tomorrow…)

…Praying For…

Dear God, you ordered creation, making all the things that are visible and invisible. Help me to participate in all the good, life-affirming things that your Creation has to offer. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, comforted by the faith that your foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and hopeful that I might let your foolishness educate me.

…Opening To…

Come, then, Lord my God, come and instruct my heart where and how to search for you, where and how to find you. Where shall I look for you, Lord? (St. Anselm)

…Listening In…

When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made—the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place—what are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them? (Psalm 8:3-4; context)

…Filling Up…

When I am engaged in a mundane activity—say, brushing my teeth or counting the bleary-eyed seconds until I hit snooze again or watching the digital numbers flick by on the counters at the gas station—the activity itself occupies only a tiny portion of my brain’s processing power. So the rest of my mind often wanders into other sections of my body. Sometimes, my mind meanders past my throat and lungs and finds its way down through that trapdoor in my gut. And I begin to ask those questions that make my gut twinge and pulse, like the feeling you get after narrowly avoiding a car accident.

I’ll be wrapping the floss around my fingers or anticipating the snap of the nozzle that signals a full tank of fuel, and I’ll look up at the sky and say, “Why do you care about me, Lord?” Then the cars will collide in my gut because, in that moment, everything I’ve ever believed is branded with a big red stamp of the word “FOOLISHNESS.”

Why do you care about me, Lord? This gut-twinging question doesn’t necessarily speculate on God’s existence. The question isn’t: “Do you exist, Lord?” There’s no reason to ask God if God exists. That would be like asking all the absent people in a classroom to raise their hands. Instead, the question acknowledges that God does, indeed, exist, but wonders why the heck God would ever care about an insignificant, messy, little thing like me. Of course, there’s no reason why God should care. This is truly first-rate foolishness.

(What? Foolishness? A cliffhanger? Don’t worry. This story isn’t finished yet! To be continued tomorrow…)

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are bigger than my mind can conceive. But I thank you that by your grace I can conceive even a small shadowy corner of your majesty. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, comforted by the faith that your foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and hopeful that I might let your foolishness educate me.

…Opening To…

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love. (Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert”)

…Listening In…

I came so that they could have life—indeed, so that they could live life to the fullest. (John 10:10; context)

…Filling Up…

When we accept that eternal life happens even as we live our earthly lives, we can begin to see the corner of the edge of the expanse of the abundance that God offers to us. When we turn off the autopilot, we can break out of the rut of living vaguely, indistinctly – which, in truth, is not really living, but merely existing. Jesus offers us abundant life, but choosing abundance is not a one-time decision. Rather, the choice is akin to choosing your child’s name. You pick it once; you write it on the birth certificate once. But then you call your child that name for the rest of his or her life.

In the same way, choosing abundance involves actively naming the paths down which our decisions and our outlooks can lead us. We can walk down the path of scarcity or the path of abundance, the path of fear or the path of love, the path of destruction or the path of creation, the path of despair or the path of joy. Choosing abundance means that we follow Jesus down the life-affirming paths of love, creation, and joy. He’ll be with us either way, I firmly believe, but when we follow our own wills down the life-denying paths of fear, destruction, and despair, then Jesus needs to trample through the undergrowth to retrieve us. The good news is this: no matter how far down the life-denying paths we find ourselves, simply turning around makes them life-affirming paths. (The reverse is also true, but let’s not dwell on that now.)

When we choose abundance, we participate in the fullness of the eternal life that God yearns for each of us. Living this kind of life keeps us from lapsing into the background of existence. So choose to accept the gift of living fully into the being that God has made. Choose abundance. After all, God has already chosen you.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are the source of all life and the cause of creation. Help me to live my life so that I always trend toward the life-affirming path of abundance, love, creation, and joy. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, ready to step into the spotlight of my life and shine in the brilliance of your presence.

…Opening To…

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love. (Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert”)

…Listening In…

And yes, you want truth in the most hidden places; you teach me wisdom in the most secret space… Create a clean heart for me, God; put a new, faithful spirit deep inside me. (Psalm 51:6, 10; context)

…Filling Up…

When we step out of the fuzzy background of our existence and embrace the eternal life of knowing God, we discover that there’s an internal switch that has been set in the wrong position. Each of us has within us a switch that controls the autopilot. Now, I’m not talking about the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates the parts of the body that we’re not fully aware of. We should probably leave that switch on. I’m talking about the autopilot that offers us the comfortable ability to sit back and read a magazine when we should be living.

When the autopilot is engaged, we travel day to day in the generally correct direction. The wings stay parallel to the ground. We don’t deviate course. We go about our daily lives because daily life is what happens when we wake up in the morning. (This might sound familiar because I talked about something similar on Tuesday.) But when you turn off the autopilot, you have to pay attention. You have to grip the yoke to keep the plane steady. You have to check course to make sure you going in the right direction. Disengaging the autopilot makes you engage life – both the life you are living as you go about your day and the life you are living within yourself. This interior life happens with equal parts mind, heart, soul, and spirit. It is in this internal space that you can check yourself to make sure you are living the kind of life God desires for you to live. When the autopilot is on, we don’t even realize we should make such checks.

Look to your internal fuselage: in what position is the autopilot switch. If it’s on, why not try flipping it and seeing what happens next?

…Praying For…

Dear God, the life that you offer elevates us from simple existence. Help me to take an active role in my own life, both the life that other people see and the life within that only you and I can see. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, ready to step into the spotlight of my life and shine in the brilliance of your presence.

…Opening To…

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love. (Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert”)

…Listening In…

When Jesus finished saying these things, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, so that the Son can glorify you. You gave him authority over everyone so that he could give eternal life to everyone you gave him. This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.” (John 17:1-3; context)

…Filling Up…

There’s a common misconception among Christians that the “eternal life” that Jesus promises doesn’t begin until after we die. This thinking has led Christians of different persuasions down varying paths. Some have decided that eternal life must be earned and set about attempting to stock up points in the win column. Others have decided that eternal life includes time after we die in a place of trials intended to, once and for all, wash sin away; what we do on earth can contribute to the length of our stay in this place labeled “purgatory,” but pretty much everyone is going to have to serve time. (But don’t worry, proponents say, the eternal nature of life means that those years spent being “purged” are just a drop in the bucket.) Still others have gone to the opposite extreme, citing the fact that it doesn’t matter what we do on earth because Jesus’ act of sacrificial redemption is good enough to cover everything that is necessary for eternal life.

Whether or not you subscribe to one or more or none of these types of doctrines, they all have one thing in common; they draw a line between life here on earth and “eternal” life in the hereafter. But if you look at Jesus’ prayer above, you’ll notice that he makes no such distinction. You don’t have to wait for death for eternal life to begin. The very notion of something “eternal” beginning doesn’t really make since if you think about it. Eternal things just are. If they had to begin, they wouldn’t be eternal. (I’m aware that the last few sentences could lead to some very interesting discussions, but we don’t have space to have them just now.)

Here’s what I’m getting at: if we mistakenly wait for death for our eternal lives to begin, we are missing out in the here and now on the abundance that Jesus offers us when we share in his life. Waiting for death before we access eternity can actually lead us away from life and into the vagueness of mere existence. But accepting that we have eternal life – now, here – can lead us to find the fullness of the life that Christ gives us to share in.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are the eternal presence that frames existence and the creative presence that breathes life into being. Help me to know you, and in knowing you, find the eternal, abundant life that you offer to all. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, ready to step into the spotlight of my life and shine in the brilliance of your presence.

…Opening To…

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love. (Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert”)

…Listening In…

In Jerusalem near the sheep gate in the north city wall is a pool with the Aramaic name Bethsaida… A certain man was there who had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, knowing that he had already been there a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well? (John 5:1, 5-6; context)

…Filling Up…

The next time you watch TV, take note of the fact that the camera can only focus on things at one particular distance away from it. Your eyes will be drawn to what is “in focus,” whether the camera focuses on the foreground, the middleground, or the background. Directors use various foci when filming to help tell the story: a character in the middleground might be in focus at the beginning of a scene, but then the camera will adjust to an object in the foreground, showing the audience that the character is looking intently at the object. Rarely is the background the focus of the scene. You can see what is there, but usually objects in the background are indistinct and fuzzy. The characters who stand in front of it are moving and vibrant – and in focus.

It’s quite easy to fall into patterns that lead us to exist solely in this indistinct background part of our own lives. We go about our daily routines: we get up, brush our teeth, shower, go to school or work, come home, watch NCIS, brush our teeth again, and go to bed. And then we do it again tomorrow (except that we have to wait till next week for NCIS). Now, routines aren’t bad or evil – in fact, they can be quite comforting, and some folk need the stability they offer more than they need anything else. But when routine becomes rut, and we do the things we do simply because they offer the path of least resistance, then we will have lapsed into the backgrounds of our own lives. We will have become indistinct, fuzzy versions of ourselves that exist as part of the scenery and not the action.

There’s a reason that this scenery is called “sets.” Everything is set, in place, not going anywhere. But God, I don’t think, let’s us stay “set.” God moves in both the backgrounds and foregrounds of our lives, and this movement pushes and pulls us into sharper focus. We can, of course, continue to exist as fuzzy background filler. But wouldn’t it be better to live in focus?

…Praying For…

Dear God, focusing on you brings my life into sharper focus. Help me to be attentive to your movement so that I may resist the wearying forces of existence that pull me into the background. In Jesus Christ’s name I pay. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, ready to step into the spotlight of my life and shine in the brilliance of your presence.

…Opening To…

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love. (Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert”)

…Listening In…

Jesus told this parable: “A man owned a fig tree planted in his vineyard. He came looking for fruit on it and found none. He said to his gardener, ‘Look, I’ve come looking for fruit on this fig tree for the past three years, and I’ve never found any. Cut it down! Why should it continue depleting the soil’s nutrients?’ The gardener responded, ‘Lord, give it one more year, and I will dig around it and give it fertilizer. Maybe it will produce fruit next year; if not, then you can cut it down.’ ” (Luke 13:6-9; context)

…Filling Up…

Have you ever been driving your car for a while and then realize all of a sudden that you don’t remember anything that happened in the previous ten minutes? More than once when I used to drive up and down I-79 in the middle of Everything-Looks-the-Same, West Virginia, I would do just that. I would look out the windshield and surprise myself with the uncomfortable fact that I was on a highway in the midst of many large, metal automobiles traveling 73 mph. Let’s see: the little Hyundai I drove back then weighed 2366 pounds. Toss in another 180 pounds for passenger and luggage. Converting to metric and employing some rules from Sir Isaac, I find that my car’s momentum was 3850N-s (that’s Newton-seconds, whatever those are). Now, I don’t know much about physics, but that seems like a lot of momentum, and I have seen my share of high-speed motor vehicle collisions. How could I ever fail to pay attention for ten seconds, let alone ten minutes?

If I can’t pay attention when doing something potentially dangerous such as driving, how often do I let everything that passes me simply flatten into mere scenery, leached of color and motion? How often do I lapse into the background of my own life? How often do I look at people and not see them or hear a voice and not listen for its meaning and timbre? The answer: pretty darn often, because life is so much easier on autopilot. Easier, but then again, I’m not sure that counts as living.

This week we are going to talk about the difference between simply existing and living – living into the fullness that God yearns for each of us. So stay tuned.

…Praying For…

Dear God, your encounter with Saul left him forever changed. Help me to recognize the changes that you have caused to happen in my life and be thankful for them. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, ready to step into the spotlight of my life and shine in the brilliance of your presence.

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I am honored and blessed to serve Godas the rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Churchin Mystic, Connecticut.

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Unless otherwise stated, I'll quote from either the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) translation of the Bible or the CEB (Common English Bible) translation of the Bible. Here's what I'm supposed to tell you: